Rants of a grumpy engineer living in London.

Configuring samba server in Mac OS X Leopard

If you don’t have Mac OS X Leopard server you have a Samba implementation limited mostly to home directories and a lot of borking around, if you’re a typical Unix Admin as I am you’ll want to take things in your hands and add the shares you want yourself in the command line.

Leopard uses Samba 3 and its own authentication and locking methods connected to its auth layer and afp locking so a typical samba config file won’t work, it also has a dynamically modificable part which is configured via System Preferences.

This is not the smartest method neither prepared for faint hearted people, but it’ll work if you’re used to Linux.

If you had samba already working on Tiger the changes are only at locking, vfs and user auth, which is what enables all the new Leopard system to work properly.

This are the exact changes from Tiger to Leopard

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# Changes affecting user mapping and authentication

passdb backend=odsam

idmap domains=default

idmap config default:default=yes

idmap config default:backend=odsam

idmap alloc backend=odsam

idmap negative cache time=5

obey pam restrictions=yes

security=USER

auth methods=guest odsam

ntlm auth=yes

lanman auth=no

usekerberos keytab=yes

com.apple:lkdc realm=LKDC:SHA1.xxx

realm=LKDC:SHA1.xxx

# Changes affecting the FS interaction and locks

vfs objects=darwinacl,darwin_streams

usesendfile=yes

ea support=yes

darwin_streams:brlm=yes

enable core files=yes

max smbd processes=10

log level=1

map toguest=Bad User

You want to take a look at the realm SHA1 strings since they’re dependant on your installation, you can always check the new /etc/smb.conf in Mac OS X Leopard and then merge it up with your previous config, or replace the config as I did and just add this.

The Leopard samba configuration is brilliant, but at the same time limited to push you to buy the Server version, at the same time it’s interesting to play with the includes it adds too, but this at least will get your previous samba config out and running fine.

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3 thoughts on “Configuring samba server in Mac OS X Leopard”

Lou Jarvissays:

Are the changes you are making to increase the buffer in RAM at the AppleTV device? I think the AppleTV device buffers the content which is sent over the LAN through its RAM and video RAM which allows it to play back more smoothly and isolates it from network interference….is this correct?

THis solved my problem with sharing folders from my mac on my home network on my PPC mac with OS X 10.5. After many many hours of torment i blindly made sure I have all the lines above in my smb.conf and it just works. I will not even try to isolate the culprit entry – I had spent too much time already on this! Thanks for this post!!!